I can’t really recall a time when Mom was not wearing
glasses. As far back as I can remember,
some form of eyewear sat firmly across the bridge of her nose. As the years passed and fashion changed, so
did the frames - from maroon cat’s eyes to blue ovals and then brown oblongs –
they came in many colors and shapes.
Most recently, the bigger the better in order to accommodate thick trifocal
lenses, which she strongly denied she wore!
At some point while in the Alzheimer’s unit she called
home, her own glasses went missing and we found someone else’s frames sitting
atop her nose. It didn’t seem to bother
her one bit that the prescription was very decidedly not her own or that the
nose pieces needed adjusting to keep them from sliding down her face. Mom was blissfully unaware of the decline in
her vision, which greatly surprised me as she had been so protective of her
eyesight in years past.
My husband and I had noticed a change in her vision
several years before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, perhaps, most
noticeably when she awakened one night screaming that there were rats all over
the carpet around her bed. Even with the
glasses back on her nose, she was convinced that the white circles on the dark
carpet were indeed of the rodent variety.
For some time we had difficulty getting her to board an
elevator, and escalators were completely beyond her. We did not realize at the time that these
changes in her ability to see and react as most of us would, was actually an
early sign of Alzheimer’s. It was
obvious that Mom didn’t see and interpret things as they really were. She was living in a whacky topsy-turvy kind
of alternate world which we shrugged off as just another one of her many eccentricities.
Her vision problems went beyond the usual far-sightedness
and cataracts to a deficit in looking at an object and being able to identify
what it was. A strand of onion caught in
the bottom of the dishwasher became a worm.
The speckled pattern on a bedspread became an army of ants marching
across her bed. Cups and plates landed
on the floor instead of on the countertop.
Daily living was a constant struggle as socks refused to stay matched
and she had trouble laying out clothes for the day whose colors
harmonized.
Mom was frustrated by a good many things that she thought
she could see clearly, but evaded her understanding. The world was not what she remembered.
* * *
It wasn’t until recently – a year after her passing –
that I myself began to understand the extent of vision problems for the
elderly, and particularly those with dementia.
I had seen the term “spatial relationships” on lists of Alzheimer’s
symptoms, but did not really understand its complexities and impact on the
individual’s life. Only when doing
research for this blog posting, did I finally realize the depth of Mom’s
frustration over a world that was not what it seemed.
Spatial relationships – and for a while I thought the
term was “special relationships” and in some sense that was correct – is the
ability to see and identify an object’s relationship in space and time to
another object. It sounded awfully sci-fi to me
and I had many other things to worry about - how to get Mom to stop driving,
for one, and how to wrestle the checkbook out of her hands, being another. Little did I know that both of those daily
living skills were, in fact, compromised because her spatial perceptions were
compromised!
(For more information on
dealing with vision problems and Alzheimer’s, read the sidebar to the right.)
* * *
“A Bandaid for the Caregiver” is dedicated to
all those families who journey with memory loss in their lives and the
sharing of hope and joy and new possibilities. In each difficult moment
there lies an opportunity for love.
Journey with courage,
Elaine
Journey with courage,
Elaine
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